DOCSLIB.ORG

First Ever English-Language Anthology of the Scandinavian Situationists

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
First Ever English-Language Anthology of the Scandinavian Situationists Nebula · Læssøegade 3, 4. · DK 2200 København N · Tel. + 4530955929 · www.nebulabooks.dk Book Announcement: First ever English-language anthology of the Scandinavian Situationists Co-Ritus action, Copenhagen 1962 (CULTURE IS CULTURE INDUSTRY, Culture Industry is FAKE, FAKE IS LABOUR: Culture Industry = ORGANISED FREE TIME) Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere Edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen & Jakob Jakobsen This is the first ever English-language anthology collecting texts and documents from the still little-known Scandinavian part of the Situationist movement. The book covers over three decades of writing, from Asger Jorn’s “Luck and Chance” published in 1953, to the statements of the Situationist Antinational set up by Jens Jørgen Thorsen and J.V. Martin in 1974. The writings collected gravitate around the year 1962 when the Situationist movement went through it’s most dynamic and critical moments, and the disagreements about the relationship between art and politics came to a culmination, resulting in exclusions and the split of the Situationist International. The Situationists did not win, and the almost forgotten Scandinavian fractions even less so. The book broadens the understanding of the Situationist movement by bringing into view the wild and unruly activities of the Scandinavian fractions of the organisation and the more artistic, experimental, and actionist attitude that characterised them. They did, nevertheless, constitute a decisive break with the ruling socio-economic order through their project of bringing into being new forms of life. Only an analysis of the multifaceted and often contradictory Situationist revolution will allow us to break away from the dull contemplation of yet another document of Debord’s archive or yet another drawing by Jorn. There is a lot to be learned from the history of revolutionary failure. It is along these lines that this book points forward beyond the crisis-ridden capitalist order that survives today. Texts by: Asger Jorn, Jørgen Nash, Jens Jørgen Thorsen, Bauhaus Situationniste, Jacqueline de Jong, Gordon Fazakerley, Gruppe SPUR, Dieter Kunzelman, J.V. Martin, and Guy Debord. Translated by: Peter Shield, James Manley, Anja Büchele, Matthew Hyland, Fabian Tompsett, and Jakob Jakobsen. Release date Copenhagen: May 2nd 2015. Release date New York City: Later in May (tba) Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is an art historian and political theorist. He is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and has published books and articles on the revolutionary tradition and modern art. Jakob Jakobsen is an artist and political organizer. He ran the Copenhagen Free University, cofounded the artist run TV-station tvtv and has participated in exhibitions all over the world. ISBN 9788799365180 $25 €25 £20 304 pages Published by: Nebula, Copenhagen & Autonomedia, New York City Press Contact: Mikkel Bolt. Tel. +4550908235. Email: [email protected] .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist
    COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere Edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen & Jakob Jakobsen 1 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE 2 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere 3 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE TEXTS FROM THE SITUATIONIST MOVEMENT IN SCANDINAVIA AND ELSEWHERE Edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen & Jakob Jakobsen COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Published 2015 by Nebula in association with Autonomedia Nebula Autonomedia TEXTS FROM THE SITUATIONIST Læssøegade 3,4 PO Box 568, Williamsburgh Station DK-2200 Copenhagen Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568 Denmark USA MOVEMENT IN SCANDINAVIA www.nebulabooks.dk www.autonomedia.org [email protected] [email protected] AND ELSEWHERE Tel/Fax: 718-963-2603 ISBN 978-87-993651-8-0 ISBN 978-1-57027-304-9 Edited by Editors: Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen & Jakob Jakobsen | Translators: Peter Shield, James Manley, Anja Büchele, Matthew Hyland, Fabian Tompsett, Jakob Jakobsen | Copyeditor: Marina Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen Vishmidt | Proofreading: Danny Hayward | Design: Åse Eg |Printed by: Naryana Press in 1,200 copies & Jakob Jakobsen Thanks to: Jacqueline de Jong, Lis Zwick, Ulla Borchenius, Fabian Tompsett, Howard Slater, Peter Shield, James Manley, Anja Büchele, Matthew Hyland, Danny Hayward, Marina Vishmidt, Stevphen Shukaitis, Jim Fleming, Mathias Kokholm, Lukas Haberkorn, Keith Towndrow, Åse Eg and Infopool (www.scansitu.antipool.org.uk) All texts by Jorn are © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg Asger Jorn: “Luck and Change”, “The Natural Order” and “Value and Economy”. Reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Natural Order and Other Texts translated by Peter Shield (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 9-46, 121-146, 235-245, 248-263.
    [Show full text]
  • Constant Nieuwenhuys-August 13, 2005
    Constant Nieuwenhuys Published in Times London, August 13 2005 A militant founder of the Cobra group of avant-garde artists whose early nihilism mellowed into Utopian fantasy Soon after the war ended, the Cobra group burst upon European art with anarchic force. The movement’s venomous name was an acronym from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, the cities where its principal members lived. And by the time Cobra’s existence was formally announced in Paris in 1948, the young Dutch artist Constant had become one of its most militant protagonists. Constant did not hesitate to voice the most extreme beliefs. Haunted by the war and its bleak aftermath, he declared in a 1948 interview that “our culture has already died. The façades left standing could be blown away tomorrow by an atom bomb but, even failing that, still nothing can disguise the fact. We have lost everything that provided us with security and are left bereft of all belief. Save this: that we live and that it is part of the essence of life to manifest itself.” The Cobra artists soon demonstrated their own exuberant, heretical vitality. Inspired by the uninhibited power of so-called primitive art, as well as the images produced by children and the insane, they planned an idealistic future where Marxist ideas would form a vibrant union with the creation of a new folk art. Constant, born Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, discovered his first motivation in a crucial 1946 meeting with the Danish artist Asger Jorn at the Galerie Pierre, Paris. They exchanged ideas and Constant became the driving force in establishing Cobra.
    [Show full text]
  • How Language Looks: on Asger Jorn and Noël Arnaud's La Langue Verte*
    How Language Looks: On Asger Jorn and No ël Arnaud’s La Langue verte* STEVEN HARRIS In November 1968, the Paris publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert brought out Asger Jorn and Noël Arnaud’s La Langue verte et la cuite , an event accompanied by a banquet for 2,000 at a Danish restaurant in Paris, and a considerable response from the press, though the book has largely dropped from view since. 1 Initially titled La Langue crue et la cuite , the book was written in French by artist Asger Jorn, founding member of Cobra and of the Situationist International, and revised by Arnaud, member of the Surrealist “Main à plume” group in occupied Paris, founding member of the Revolutionary Surrealist group in postwar Paris (with which Jorn was also involved), and later regent in the Collège de ’Pataphysique. 2 Jorn, in addition to writing the text, also chose the illustrations, while Arnaud added sections of his own and reordered the material in collaboration with Jorn. It is thus the collective labor of two individuals who had first met in Paris in 1946, and who were both involved in the Revolutionary Surrealist group, a splinter group of Communist persuasion that had seceded from the main body of the Surrealist group shortly before the opening of its exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 , at the Galerie Maeght. If Cobra was very much ori - ented against Arnaud when it was first formed in 1948, the paths of the two men crossed numerous times in subsequent years. Jorn turned to Arnaud as a trusted friend who was in in sympathy with his aims, who corrected Jorn’s rather casual French, and who in general was willing to lend a hand to the enterprise.
    [Show full text]
  • Insinuation: Détournement and Gendered Repetition
    Patrick Greaney Insinuation: Détournement as Gendered Repetition Actif, passif, vieilles conneries. —Guy Hocquenghem, “Les culs énergumènes” The Gendered Concepts of Détournement and Spectacle ​Détournement is the Lettrist and Situationist term for a specific kind of montage or appropria- tion; it might seem to be a form of quotation, but it is “the antithesis of quotation, of a theoretical authority invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable.”1 Examples of détournement projects suggested by Guy Debord and Gil Wol- man in their 1956 “User’s Guide to Détourne- ment” include modified pinball machines and a new version of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation that would accompany the film’s images with a voiceover narrating the history of the Ku Klux Klan.2 One of the better-known completed works that relies on détournement is René Viénet’s redubbing of a martial arts film with a voice track about the proletarian struggle, titled Can Dialec- tics Break Bricks?3 Debord also uses the term to describe his use of phrases from G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Georg Lukács, and others in The Society of the Spectacle. The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:1, Winter 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-2010-023 © 2010 Duke University Press 76 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Winter 2011 Debord’s Society of the Spectacle presents détournement as a “device” in the struggle against the spectacle (§206). There are many definitions of the spectacle in The Society of the Spectacle, but this temporal description is one of the most useful: “The spectacle, being the reigning social organi- zation of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time, is a false consciousness of time” (§158; translation modified).
    [Show full text]
  • Situationists and Architecture, Debord Suggests, Albisola Can Be Seen
    peter wollen SITUATIONISTS AND ARCHITECTURE his is not a conventional scholarly essay. Instead I want to discuss a number of topics addressed by the Situationists, Tmaking a kind of collage of commentaries on what seem to me to be key elements of their thought in relation to archi- tecture and the city—which were, indeed, centrally important issues for them. These elements are as follows: 1, the minaret; 2, the gypsy camp; 3, dérive; 4, Mad King Ludwig; 5, the Postman Cheval; 6, the Merzbau; 7, Le Corbusier; 8, Paris; 9, psychogeography; 10, Love on the Left Bank; 11, white bicycles; 12, détournement; 13, the Cavern of Anti- Matter; 14, New Babylon; 15, Watts; 16, the Architecture of Despair; 17, Vienna’s Place—and fi nally: 18, Albisola. 1 I begin with the minaret. In 1948 Asger Jorn wrote an article titled ‘What is an Ornament?’, which was published in an obscure Danish journal. That same year, he had spent time in Djerba, Tunisia, which I believe is the same place that Paul Klee visited and which had such an infl uence on his calligraphic style of drawing. Among the illustrations to Jorn’s essay was one juxtaposing a ‘horsetail’ and a minaret. The horsetail is a kind of plant, whose structure is very similar to that of the minaret depicted next to it—a kind of telescopic series of towers, each with a nar- rower diameter than the last, piled on top of each other, fi nally ending with a tiny little turret at the topmost point. (The picture of the horsetail looks as if it was one of Blossfeldt’s famous series of photographs of plants, but I have not been able to check this.) The point Jorn wishes to make is summed up in his caption: ‘Horsetail and Minaret.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cavern of Antimatter: Giuseppe "Pinot" Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International
    The Cavern of Antimatter: Giuseppe "Pinot" Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Nicola Pezolet, "The Cavern of Antimatter: Giuseppe "Pinot" Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International," Grey Room, Winter 2010, No. 38, Pages 62-89. (doi:10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.62) © 2010 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.62 Publisher MIT Press Journals Version Final published version Citable link http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55965 Terms of Use Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. Pinot Gallizio, Asger Jorn, Piero Simondo, and friends working outside the Alba Experimental Laboratory, 1956. Courtesy of the Gallizio Archive, Turin. 62 The Cavern of Antimatter: Giuseppe “Pinot” Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International NICOLA PEZOLET Perhaps the machine is the only instrUment qUalified to create that is inflationary and indUstrial and therefore based on the anti-patent; the new indUstrial cUltUre will only be “Made by the People,” or it will not be. —GiUseppe “Pinot” Gallizio, 1959 DUring its formative years (1957–1960), the SitUationist International (SI) charted a paradoxical relationship between an enthUsiasm
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction: from the Notion of Spectacle to Spectacle 2.0: the Dialectic of Capitalist Mediations Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano
    CHAPTER 2 Introduction: From the Notion of Spectacle to Spectacle 2.0: The Dialectic of Capitalist Mediations Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano 1. Context and Purpose Sometimes the literary fortune of a book can almost be unfortunate. We think this is the case of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, which on the one hand succeeded where most of our scholarship concerned with the production of critical knowledge tends to fail, by going beyond the constraining walls of aca- demic discourse and inspiring human emancipation. On the other hand, while the idea of the Spectacle has infiltrated the collective imagery, it has most fre- quently done so through the popularization of its most glaring surface, thus limiting its overall significance. It is indeed easier to think of the Debordian notion as spectacularly medi- ated content – such as media images and extravagant events – rather than the general process of mediation that for Debord propels the Spectacle. That is because we do live in a media saturated environment, but to the point in which How to cite this book chapter: Briziarelli, M. and Armano, E. 2017. Introduction: From the Notion of Spectacle to Spectacle 2.0: The Dialectic of Capitalist Mediations. In: Briziarelli, M. and Armano, E. (eds.). The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism. Pp. 15–47. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16997/book11.b. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 16 The Spectacle 2.0 the mediation logic that drives current conditions of life in many societies has gone beyond spectacular images, and is increasingly subsuming more spheres of social life to the total and integral Spectacle: capitalism.
    [Show full text]
  • Lynchian Cognitive Mapping and Situationist Psychogeography
    Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 1-1-2006 A critical and historical case study of experience design : Lynchian cognitive mapping and Situationist psychogeography Derek Cori Wallen Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Recommended Citation Wallen, Derek Cori, "A critical and historical case study of experience design : Lynchian cognitive mapping and Situationist psychogeography" (2006). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 19068. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/19068 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A critical and historical case study of experience design: Lynchian cognitive mapping and Situationist psychogeography by Derek Cori Wallen A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Graphic Design Program of Study Committee: Paula J. Curran, Major Professor Sunghyun Kang Michael J. Golec Carl W. Roberts Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2006 Copyright ©Derek Cori Wallen, 2006. All rights reserved. 11 Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the master's thesis of Derek Cori Wallen has met the thesis requirements of Iowa State University Signatures have been redacted for privacy 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES iv LIST OF TABLES v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi ABSTRACT vii CHAPTER 1.
    [Show full text]
  • JACQUELINE DE JONG Born 1939 in Hengelo, Netherlands Lives And
    JACQUELINE DE JONG Born 1939 in Hengelo, Netherlands Lives and works in Amsterdam and in the Bourbonnais, France Solo Exhibitions 2021 Jacqueline de Jong, MOSTYN Contemporary Art Gallery, Wales (upcoming); touring to WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels Solo exhibition, Treize, Paris (upcoming) 2020 Jacqueline de Jong, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels 2019-20 Resilience(s), Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London Sprouted Behaviour, Eenwerk Gallery, Amsterdam Pinball Wizard: the Work and Life of Jacqueline de Jong, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Billiards, 1976-78, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles 2018-19 Jacqueline de Jong & The Situationist Times: Same Player Shoots Again!, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö: touring to Museum Jorn, Silkeborg 2018 Jacqueline de Jong, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse 2017 Imagination à Rebours, Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague Imaginary Disobedience, Château Shatto, Los Angeles Potato Blues, onestar press, Paris 2016 The Case of the Ascetic Satyr, Galerie Clemens Thimme, Karlsruhe 2015 Trains, Jacqueline de Jong & Celine Manz, Sociëteit De Kring, Amsterdam 2014 Art Traverse, Gemeentehuis de Bilt, Bilthoven Pommes de Jong, Gallery Clemens Thimme, Karlsruhe WAR: The imminent conflict (again), Gallery Suzanne Biederberg, Amsterdam 2012 All the King’s Horses, Moderna Museet, Stockholm Yale University Beinecke Rare Books and manuscripts library, New Haven, Connecticut Jacqueline de Jong: Life and Times…Recent Work, Gallery Suzanne Biederberg Jacqueline de Jong: The Situationist Times 1962-1967, Gallery Boo-Hooray, New York, Connecticut
    [Show full text]
  • Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism in Silkeborg, Denmark
    Niels Henriksen – Asger Jorn Article 5, Inferno Volume VIII, 2003 1 Asger Jorn and the Photographic Essay on Scandinavian Vandalism Niels Henriksen n the last few years the Danish painter, potter and sculptor Asger Jorn (1914-1973) has had a revival. He has been the subject of several publications and large exhibitions at The National Museum in ICopenhagen and Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen. Although Asger Jorn is sometimes presented as the Scandinavian exponent of post war Abstract Expressionism, he was really a movement of his own, consciously working against such categorisations, and arguing against abstraction in art. The artistic practices of Jorn are perhaps so defiant of categorisation because they rely on and exist in constant dialogue with a quite original theoretical framework, which evolved with the artist throughout his life. From the beginning of the 1940s onwards Jorn was the initiator of periodicals and movements and always an ardent supplier of manifestos and articles. The best known of these movements are the COBRA-group and the Situationist International. The Situationist movement has, like Jorn, although rather independently of him, recently received a revival or interest, especially in the fields of architecture and urban planning, but also in literature and art. The first SI (Situationist International) was held 1957 at Cosio d’Arroscia in Italy, with participation of the LPC (London Psychogeographic Committee), LI (Lettrist International), the LPI (Potlatch LI) and IMBI (International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus). Central to the Situationist movement was a defiance of the “spectacle”, the capitalist creation of artificial dreams and desires, and the realisation of every person as an artist.
    [Show full text]
  • THE SPECTACLE 2.0 Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism the Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism
    CDSMS EDITED BY MARCO BRIZIARELLI AND EMILIANA ARMANO THE SPECTACLE 2.0 Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism Edited by Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano University of Westminster Press www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk Acknowledgements The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness (Thesis 29, 1967) Dobbiamo convincerci che oggi, quanto al risveglio del fattore sogget- tivo, non possiamo rinnovare e continuare gli anni Venti, ma dobbiamo cominciare da un nuovo punto di partenza, sia pure utilizzando tutte le esperienze che sono patrimonio del movimento operaio e del marxismo. Dobbiamo renderci conto infatti chiaramente che abbiamo a che fare con un nuovo inizio, o per usare un’analogia, che noi ora non siamo negli anni Venti del Novecento ma in un certo senso all’inizio dell’Ottocento, quando dopo la rivoluzione francese si cominciava a formare lentamente il movi- mento operaio. Credo che questa idea sia molto importante per il teorico, perché ci si dispera assai presto quando l’enunciazione di certe verità pro- duce solo un’eco molto limitata. (Ontologia dell’Essere Sociale, G. Lukács) Un ringraziamento particolare va a Christian Fuchs per aver discusso in pro- fondità il progetto editoriale e per averlo sostenuto in quanto editore e revisore. Siamo altresì grati a Kylie Jarrett e Eran Fisher per averci incoraggiato nelle fasi iniziali di ideazione. iv The Spectacle 2.0 Alla stesura di questo libro hanno anche collaborato, del tutto involontari- amente, Romano Alquati, Tom Bunyard and Jonathan Crary.
    [Show full text]
  • Press Release Asger Jorn
    Press Release Asger Jorn The Prints March 23―June 30, 2019 Mönchsberg [4] A twofold premiere: the first comprehensive retrospective of the work Press of Asger Jorn (1914 Vejrum, DK―1973 Aarhus, DK) in Austria will also Mönchsberg 32 be the first exhibition outside Denmark to present the artist’s entire 5020 Salzburg printed oeuvre. Austria T +43 662 842220-601 Salzburg, March 22, 2019. In the exhibition Asger Jorn. The Prints, the F +43 662 842220-700 Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents around 550 works of graphic art by [email protected] the preeminent Danish visual artist, including lithographs, woodcuts, www.museumdermoderne.at etchings, linocuts, silkscreen prints, and potato prints. “As with past exhibition projects, we are drawing on our own collection; fine art prints make up half of our holdings, and among them are works by Asger Jorn given to the museum by its founding director, Otto Breicha, that are now on view in our galleries. A generous loan from the Museum Jorn enables us to show the complete set of ca. 550 prints, the first such presentation anywhere in the world,” Thorsten Sadowsky, director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, notes. An ensemble of fifty-two works dating from between 1933 and 1939 that were recently rediscovered in Denmark and have been on public display only once is also on its way to Salzburg. Complementing his work in painting—and, to Jorn’s mind, in no way secondary to it—the prints he created between the 1930s and 1970s bear witness to the artist’s zest for experimentation and his interest in the potentials of his materials as well as his prodigious fabulist’s imagination and wit.
    [Show full text]